“I WANT WOMEN TO BELIEVE IN THEMSELVES”
King now serves on the board of the Women’s Sports Foundation, which has invested over $100 million to expand opportunities for girls and women through sports.
Fight for yourself. Think about how much you need, how much you want and what you’re worth.”
Billie Jean King
Unfinished Business
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After retiring from tennis in 1983, King didn’t miss a beat before putting her business instincts back to work.
She became the first woman commissioner in pro sports in 1984 as overseer of World TeamTennis, “the only professional sports league where men and women have equal roles,” according to King’s website.
In 1974 she founded the Women’s Sports Foundation (WSF) to expand opportunities for girls and women through sports, working to safeguard Title IX, influence policy change and advocate for LGBTQ+ athletes. “If we can get a girl into sports,” says King, “we know it’s going to change her life for the better.”
She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009; formed the nonprofit Billie Jean King Foundation, dedicated to promoting equality and inclusion; wrote a memoir; became part owner of a major-league baseball team with her wife, Ilana Kloss—and somehow still had fuel in the tank.
In 2022, she and Kloss founded BJK Enterprises, a women-led investment, consulting and marketing firm that continues King’s campaign for equality by partnering with companies to challenge the status quo and level the playing field for women and other underrepresented communities.
Even at 80, she’s lobbying for the social change she imagined as a kid at the tennis club almost 70 years ago.
“What drives me at my age is that there are so many things I want to do that need to be completed or at least moved forward,” says King. “I’m not the type to sit around and do nothing.”